Wiping a 1TB drive is going to take a very long time. Here's something for you to consider: Just how many gigabytes of data do you have on that 1TB partition? Does it really have to be that big? I currently have around 50GB of data on a 200GB partition for C: drive. More than enough room, and if I need more, I can extend the partition. If you decide to shrink your C: partition, keep one thing in mind: you should go into your system recovery settings and allocate a larger percentage in order to maintain the same amount of disk space for your system restore points. (2% of 1000GB=20GB and 10% of 200GB=20GB, understand?)
That is something I think I will do...right now I want to overwrite old deleted data first and was wondering if the 1 pass simple overwrite is good enough to keep consumer data recovery software from working?
I started the 3 pass option but that was going to take about 9 hours.
I just want to keep the average person with data recovery software from recovering personal info if my computer is stolen.
(Not worried about the NSA etc.)
Also, will the drive wiper work on flash drives...I heard that formatting them does not securely erase data.
Yes, one pass is absolutely sufficient for overwrites. Yes, Drive Wiper will work on flash drives, it's essential to use only one pass. Search this forum for all the arguments.
If your pc is pinched then the felons will be able to see all your live files, won't they?
It's all nonsense really. I guess Piriform offer these silly multiple overwrites because everybody else does, so the software is seen as more 'complete'.
If you want to be a smarty pants then consider that overwrites are cumulative, and can't be peeled back layer by layer. So if data has been written to your disk sectors 50 times by normal use prior to you writing your very important data, and you overwrite the VID once, then it's exactly the same as a 50 times overwrite.
Every time you write data to a disk you're doing a multi, multi overwrite of what was there before.